"Message me" is through a bot in my main messenger app, so the agent is just a chat window for me. "Later" happens per my requests, and agent has an ability to do something later because I just automatically invoke it on a schedule periodically, and ask it "check notes and chat history — do you need to do something, like message the user to remind them of something", and agent has the message_user tool to do that (that goes to the messenger bot API). Or it can decide to do nothing.
Reading Matt Levine's latest column on this CBDC was sort of mind blowing. With a truly centralized digital currency the Fed would basically monopolize all bank deposits (why store money in the bank at all when your digital wallet is perfectly safe) and destroy the entire banking sector.
So they are forced to decentralize the currency to some extent, so that banks are the ones to actually issue the currency (after borrowing it from the fed).
Or couldn’t it force banks to offer better rates on accounts? If the Fed will store your money for free, then the banks would have to offer a few percent return to get you to lend to them.
Exactly. CBDC is not a response to cryptocurrencies. It is a (belated) response to the fact that the way cashless economies have evolved has basically privatized money-as-infrastructure.
The privacy implications of CDBC are a real problem, but the rapidly approaching end game of the current slippery slope is one in which, among other things, all participation in the economy is gated entirely by private banks. No sovereign country should accept that. And yes, any real implementation of a blockchain as a day-to-day cash replacement will have the same problem. These are legal problems requiring a legal solution, not a technical one.
I think you’re talking about his column from Tuesday [1], which talks about different research at the Fed [2] that suggested that there is a trade off between “credit provision” (i.e. private lenders taking a risk and extending credit to their customers who they have relationships with) and “stability”. In a credit crunch, investors could flee to a CBDC and make the crisis worse.
> why store money in the bank at all when your digital wallet is perfectly safe
Because banks lend the money out, earn revenue from that, and thereby pay you interest. Banks aren't vaults; they are money circulation machines. Their business is finding the best investments, which creates efficiency in allocation of capital in the economy.
Banks in the UK pay out a maximum of 1% interest on even the best savings accounts (i. e. the return doesn't even keep pace with average person's PoV inflation). I am skeptical of this explanation for why we should let the banks hold our money. Or indeed remain alive as anything but a source of borrowing.
> Banks in the UK pay out a maximum of 1% interest on even the best savings accounts (i. e. the return doesn't even keep pace with average person's PoV inflation).
Interest paid on deposits is a free market (generally speaking); if that rate isn't worthwhile to people, they will start leaving and the bank will raise its rates.
> I am skeptical of this explanation for why we should let the banks hold our money.
You aren't 'letting' them and it's not a collective decision. You personally choose to give them your money. Put it elsewhere if you like.
> Or indeed remain alive as anything but a source of borrowing.
They can't lend money without deposits. The deposits are the money they lend.
> if that rate isn't worthwhile to people, they will start leaving and the bank will raise its rates.
No, that is evidently not happening. When I said "banks", I meant "literally all banks" (minus tiny regional credit unions or the occasional fluke that might give you up to 1.2% - wow, that is so much money, I could retire on it). People generally don't move banks either. They tend to stay with whomever they started banking first.
> You aren't 'letting' them and it's not a collective decision. You personally choose to give them your money. Put it elsewhere if you like.
My main alternative to holding cash in a bank is cryptocurrencies (which are accepted ~nowhere), or holding my money as cash. Handling cash has been in decline even before the pandemic, and nowadays I very rarely see people pay cash. Assuming that cash remains on the current trajectory, banks will become the only mainstream option.
> They can't lend money without deposits. The deposits are the money they lend.
They have enough money saved up in their coffers for that. I also can't imagine that most loans for a higher value than a credit card account would be entirely unsecured. This is especially true for house purchases - it's generally impossible to buy the house you want without a mortgage, and the house is what you lose I'd you don't pay them back.
It’s somewhat true in the sense that banks need to keep some fraction of their deposits in cash as reserves (the “reserve ratio”). So if they lend money it needs to be backed to that extent by their deposits.
A FOIA request to the fed about their stimulus spending from 2008-2010 was just released, and in this period the fed spend nearly 30 trillion to bail out banks so there being a separation between it and the banks is questionable
Banks don't make any money from your accounts. In fact your money in cash accounts is a liability to the banks. Banks also do not hold mortgages, they sell them as soon as the ink is dry. There's a lot of misunderstandings about the current banking system in this subthread with knowledge of what banking was decades ago. No banks would go out of business from this.
Frankly that is the best case scenario for crypto. It's similar to the dot com bubble in 1999 actually, it's 20 years later and the internet is finally somewhat useful and intergrated into our lives. Originally it was just a bubble inflated with ad revenue inflated with investor money
That's a super niche application, not a mass market use.
And yes, I know about the supposed use for people in countries with unstable regimes but I'm not convinced at the moment. Plus that use case, being that of people generally having low disposable incomes (barring China) absolutely doesn't justify the market value of crypto at the moment.
Inflation hits the masses, or in general money supply manipulation schemes. In the last few weeks, markets tanked just because the FEDs announced they plan to increase interest rates. Is that really how we want to go on?
Bitcoin is not being manipulated. You may be confusing it with Bitcoin markets and Bitcoin trading. Nobody can conjure Bitcoin out of thin air or manipulate interest rates on it.
That's exactly what Bitcoin miners do: They take pure thin air and convert it into noxious power plant fumes. Pure air is what the odiferous Bitcoin is conjured out of.
There's some detail on weth.io. apparently ETH is not Ethereum (ERC-20) compatible, if you can believe it.
I'm still kind of confused how ypu go from one ERC-20 chain to another. I know there's wrapped Ether on other chains but I'm not clear on how it got there or whether it's a good idea to hold that. Seems like a "not my keys" situation in a way.
So, could the Ethereum community get together and agree to rewrite the blockchain and undo this transaction? Perhaps they could vote on it and have a hearing of the facts. Of course that introduces its own tyranny but is it possible?
It is possible. That's why you have Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, two different chains. The latter one is the unaltered chain, while Ethereum (which is the most popular that's everybody are using) has been forked in such a way that you're describing once after a large hack.
Specifically, it forked because even though the system is specifically designed to make rewriting history impossible, the hackers screwed so many users that they decided to undo it by ignoring history and starting from before the hack.
... Lest anyone ever think Blockchain tech is somehow immune to network effects and social considerations.
Technically, rather than ignoring history and starting from before the hack, they added a nonstandard transaction (not generally allowed) which reversed the effects of the hack.
This did not revert other transactions that happened after the hack.
But, yes, blockchain stuff is fundamentally based on consensus about what the rules are, and people/organizations with more social influence can [...] .
The chain is by nature append only, so you'd have to fork it, which they sure as hell are not going to do for a "little guy," to put it mildly. At least, that's my layman's understanding.
No, they were 10 days apart and it would take many billions of millenia for something to cross the known universe and come back.
But the universe does loop back on itself, presumably. All matter and energy will eventually slow down and reverse course and be drawn back to the center.
You have the right personality for work-from-home. There are others who need that social interaction in order to be productive.
When I was in the office, most developers had headphones on when working and you wouldn't interrupt them at that time.
I definitely agree that if you're in the kind of role where you can turn off notifications and just put your head down and work, this has probably been a very productive year.
It used to be that you could not IPO unless you were profitable, and furthermore the point of an IPO was to raise money needed to fund growth. But today these companies have raised enough money from VC's that they don't need any more from the public markets. By listing shares and letting these insiders sell, there is more limited supply and great demand, so they can sell tiny stakes for inflated prices. It's really great for VC's and other insiders.
